LYSANDER: (to HERMIA) Get you gone, you dwarf,
You minimus of hindering knotgrass made,
You bead, you acorn! (III.ii)
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Both Lysander and Demitrius are very mean to Helena after they are made to fall in love with Hermia. One of their favorite subjects to comment on is her height, which is bought up several times throughout the play. She is much shorter than Hermia, and once the two men fall in love with her, they play on Helena’s size a lot, using hyperbole and over-exaggerating in order to make her feel worse and worse about herself.
KATHARINA: "Asses are made to bear, and so are you."
PETRUCHIO: "Women are made to bear, and so are you."
KATHARINA: "No such jade as you, if me you mean."
PETRUCHIO: "Alas, good Kate, I will not burden thee,/For knowing thee to be but young and light."
KATHARINA: "Too light for such a swain as you to catch,/And yet as heavy as my weight should be."
PETRUCHIO: "Should be? Should-buzz!"
KATHARINA: "Well ta'en, and like a buzzard."
PETRUCHIO: “O slow-winged turtle, shall a buzzard take thee?”
KATHARINA: “ Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard” (II.i)
Much of the insults in The Taming of the Shrew come about in scenes with Kate in them. In this scene, Kate is very insulting to Petruchio, who is quick and thoughtful enough to come back at Kate whenever she verbally attacks him. Petruchio, however, does not usually insult Kate back, he turns her abuse into implication.
Genre Commentary
Magic is a common theme in both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in The Tempest. Within Midsummer, magic came in the form of fairies and the love potion, which also tied together because Puck (a fairy) was the one who put the potion on the four lovers eyes while they were asleep. This magic is the catalyst for the whole plot of the play, the lovers turning against one another, but then, in the end, the potion restores order so Lysander ends up loving Hermia, and vice versa, and Demitrius ends up loving Helena, who she was in love with all along.
Bottom is also greatly affected by magic in two ways. Firstly, Puck turns Bottom’s head into that of a donkey, though Bottom doesn’t realize it, which makes him the character that he is: ridiculous and completely oblivious to his own stupidity. The other way that Bottom is affected is that Titania, the Queen of the fairies falls in love with him through use of the love potion, and this serves to boost his ego even more and make him feel like he is even more loved and admired.
The Tempest uses magic in a different way, such that fairies are still seen, but a type that is different than those such as Puck, Titania, and Oberon. Ariel is considered a type of fairy spirit, but she is enslaved by Prospero and can only use his magic for Prospero’s own uses. Prospero also uses his magic to create the circumstances that all of the characters in the play must live under, from Alonso and Ferdinand to Ariel and Caliban to his daughter Miranda.
Personal Reflection
Overall, I enjoyed reading these two of Shakespeare’s comedies, along with The Tempest. The Taming of the Shrew, while it was slightly harder to read, was very entertaining, with all of the physical and verbal comedy used, especially between Kate and Petruchio and Petruchio and Grumio. While I did like Kate as a character at first, it was good to watch her become a domesticated wife to Petruchio throughout her travels back and forth from Padua to Petruchio’s home in the country.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream was interesting to read in class because it was easier to keep track of which character was in love with whom and when. I also liked that it was a play within a play, and that there was a play within the second play, though it did confuse me as to why Shakespeare never showed the scene at the inn again where the play was being performed.
The Tempest was by far my favorite, mostly for the fact that Caliban was my favorite of the characters out of these three plays. Although he was meant to be an antagonist, I almost felt bad for him for the way that Prospero took his island and enslaved him. Caliban was never even given a choice about anything, even though he appeared to be the only real inhabitant of the island before Prospero’s ship wrecked there.
